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Stop Drowning in Metrics and Optimize KPIs That Move the Needle

There are countless ways for a baseball team to win a game. Maybe it ends up being a 1-to-0 duel between two ace starting pitchers. Or maybe it's a high-scoring affair—a wild 10-to-7 game with plenty of home runs and questionable pitching performances—yielding a bounty of baseball statistics ranging from the traditional (batting average, strikeouts, runs batted in) to the advanced (batting average on balls in play, fielding-independent pitching, on-base plus slugging).

If you're an analytical sports fan like me, all those numbers are pieces in a bigger performance puzzle. But, at the end of the day, one metric matters above all else: wins.

In the same way that there's no trophy given to the team with the highest slugging percentage or the fewest runners left on base each year, successful marketing campaigns aren't determined based on diagnostic metrics alone.

Don't fall into the trap of letting these middle metrics dominate your campaign at the cost of wins.

Don't do anything without a solid measurement plan

Most companies want to enter into digital marketing campaigns with well-defined objectives. Marketing agencies often embrace that approach because it gives them a target and a way to prove progress is being made. Boosting total webpage visits, increasing open rates, and reducing average cost per click are common examples of digital marketing objectives.

Unfortunately, such a singular focus on one component of a complex customer journey can prove detrimental to a company's bottom line. A marketer charged with boosting website visits will diligently work toward that goal, but the benefit is meaningless when the new visitors do not become profitable customers or do not convert at all. The same principle applies throughout the system: A celebration for a 10% drop in cost per click is short-lived when Sales reports that it experienced a 15% crash in revenue during the same period.

To avoid this problem, it is necessary to define goals and the ways they will be measured—before developing a digital marketing strategy.